Hi,
I have a windows application . which needs some data from one of our other web application which is very secured.
Say I have a page in my WinApp which asks for employeeID after I put the employee ID and click the "go" button , It should bring up the emp details web page[ Say for eg:Empdetails.aspx]. Can you give me any clue as to how I can work this out???


Alienaheart

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Alienaheart

You could clearly force a browser to come up from a WinApp, but I certainly don't see how that helps you IN THE LEAST to get any value from the Web app. They will be running in separate process spaces (I don't think you can ask the win app to bring up a browser in the same process....but I could be wrong about that) and so won't have access to each other's memory spaces.

A *much* better way to do this is to have the web app provide a web service that you can invoke from the win app. That is, design ahead of time for this situation.

Failing that, you could have your win app *pretend* that it is a browser (that is, it could make an HTTP request of the server, passing the appropriate credentials and request information). How hard or easy that is depends on how the web app's security is handled. Having done this, you'd still have to "screen scrape" the HTML returned from the web app looking for the relevant data.

Secure web services is definitely a very good first approach.

In response to Old Pedant: You can embed a web browser into a winforms app. It does run as a separate process (Internet Explorer) but you can wire up the browser object to the windows form such that java script on the page can talk to the hosting container through the "document.external" object and similarly the hosting container can talk to the browser document object model through a property on the browser control. I just finished an application that uses this with great success.

-Peter
compiledthoughts.com

Fascinating. And what about security??? If the browser talks to the host via HTTPS, is it then NOT considered a security hole for the app to be able to scrape content???

Seems to me like this would be a great way for hackers to start grabbing user names and passwords and whatever. Convince a few idiots to install this wonderful new "improved high security browser!" and you have any info you want. Ehh...I guess it's no worse than a browser plugin that does the same thing. Let the naive users of the world beware.

planoie,

do you have an example of how to get from the webpage to the winapp? I can get from the winapp to the webpage